Water Colour Fun

Hey there!

I’ve been dabbling in water colours lately and it’s been super fun.  Seems it’s one of those activities that you can lose yourself in and forget about time passing.  Great for the soul – not so great for my kids when they’re waiting for me to make them lunch, lol!

I went to a Close To My Heart workshop/meeting a few weeks ago and during the creative session, we made three cards using the new CTMH water colour paint set.  These are fun and easy techniques anyone can do so if you want to give it a go you might want to try one of these…

On this first card, we used a doily as a stencil and dabbed different colours of paint through the holes in the doily onto water colour paper, letting the paint colours mix and mingle. Once it was dry, we stamped the ‘Hello’ and added a few black paint splatters.Here, I used an acrylic stamp block to create the pink rectangles on this card. Just paint and press. If you try this technique, make sure you use quite a bit of water to get good coverage.On this card, we used a lot of water to blend and run the colours of the rainbow together. The ‘hey’ was heat embossed first before any colour was added so it would resist the paint. I outlined it with a black marker to make it stand out and then stamped the ‘thanks’.

There are so many tools you can use to create water colour artwork.  I’ve been busy watching some amazing artists on YouTube for inspiration and techniques. Wow, they make it look so easy!  So much so that I couldn’t resist trying a scene of my own using a farm stamp set I had as the starting point. I don’t consider myself much of a sketch artist so this worked great.I used water based markers to colour the stamps instead of using an ink pad.  Once the images were stamped (horses, tree and barn), I went in with a paint brush and a bit of water to smudge the ink and get that water colour look. This particular stamp set is great because the images contain the outline and the shading marks. It really made it easy to add shadows and colour with paints.  When my main images were dry, I filled in the sky, meadow and flowers with paint.  For this scene, I used a combination of water based markers, water colour paint pens, paint brushes and a water colour cake palette to paint the picture. Not bad for a first try. I will definitely do this again – so much fun!

The last card I have to show you today is one I made for a close friend of mine.  Her birthday is coming up in April so I have to get this in the mail. I masked the top and bottom of the water colour paper and then did a wash of colours for the background.  Once that dried, I stamped the flowers with Momento Tuxedo Black ink and then painted the flowers with water colours.

Doesn’t the last one make you long for spring? We are getting quite a bit of rain here and I’m anxious to see the last of the snow get washed away. Won’t be long before the flowers start pushing through the dirt.  Yay spring!

Hope you’re inspired to try a little water colour of your own. Until next time.

~Tracy